Started this before change to "New Blogger", as backup in case of trouble with digiphoto blog "In a Small Dark Room", or rants & links blog "Hello Cruel World" . Useful - at one stage Dark Room was there, but like the astrophysical Dark Matter, we could't see it ... better now, but kept Just In Case.

There is nothing. There is no God and no universe, there is only empty
space, and in it a lost and homeless and wandering and companionless
and indestructible Thought. And I am that thought. And God, and the
Universe, and Time, and Life, and Death, and Joy and Sorrow and Pain
only a grotesque and brutal dream, evolved from the frantic imagination
of that same Thought.
Mark Twain (letter to Joseph Twichell after his wife's death)
[me, on a bad day]
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Whatever the realpolitik calculations, on the emotional level relations between the US and its Saudi guarantors of cheap petrol - always unsentimental - have never been worse.

While Muslim fundamentalists continue to preach against the Great Satan, America's natural constituency among liberal and reform-minded educated Saudis has been alienated by what it sees as hostility towards Arabs since the September 11 attacks.

Over the past three years tens of thousands of young Saudis have returned home from US universities to escape official or unofficial harassment or because of difficulties in renewing study visas.

"After 9/11 they say that all Arabs and Muslims are terrorists," said the editor of Arab News, Khalid al-Maeena, whose son recently returned from a US university without graduating. "This has made young Arabs turn against the West. They like to listen to Ricky Martin and Mark Anthony and have coffee at Starbucks, and yet their sentiments are increasingly anti-American."

"Saudis love the West and they hate it," said Mansour al-Nogaidan, once a leading Islamic hardliner and now a liberal dissident. "They love Western civilisation but they hate it because they feel inferior. They hate the thought that it is stronger than we are, that it is up while we are a long way down."

Man tries to convert lions to Jesus, gets bitten46-year-old leaps into den at Taipei Zoo, calls beasts to Christianity
[There is video of this - watch TV news.]
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6396422/
Updated: 5:51 a.m. ET Nov. 3, 2004TAIPEI, Taiwan - A man leaped into a lion’s den at the Taipei Zoo on Wednesday to try to convert the king of beasts to Christianity, but was bitten in the leg for his efforts.
“Jesus will save you!” shouted the 46-year-old man at two African lions lounging under a tree a few metres away.

“Come bite me!” he said with both hands raised, television footage showed.

One of the lions, a large male with a shaggy mane, bit the man in his right leg before zoo workers drove it off with water hoses and tranquilizer guns.

Newspapers said that the lions had been fed earlier in the day, otherwise the man might have been more seriously hurt ... or worse.

Copyright 2004 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.

Many good useful & hopeful things (as well as rage, despair, &c.) on the "Bad morning" thread at Making Light -- http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/005687.html

I really thought that today would be the beginning of our recovery from the current low point. But I guess we have lower to sink. Doesn't mean we won't rise again eventually.

And in my right hand I hold my sorrow
And with my left hand I reach for joy
We all are soldiers whether we fight or fall
No one can run from the scorns of time

"Scorns of Time", on the Simple Path album, by Irene Kelley and Claire Lynch

What I resent most about this election is that 80% of the people who based their decision on "moral values" voted for Bush. Since when did the Republican Party become the last bastion of morality? Well, because they say they are and Democrats are resistent to portraying themselves that way.

These people who voted for moral values believe that abortion is murder and that homosexuals are out to wreck their marriages, but not that every child should be adequately educated or that the elderly should not have to choose between their prescription drugs and their food for the month. The reason they focus on abortion and homosexual marriage is that someone told them who was to fear and what was to blame for their problems in life ...

What I keep coming back to is an article I read last year about how conservatives use language to dominate politics. The link:
http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2003/10/27_lakoff.shtml

There must be a way to make people see that bombing terrorists only breeds more terrorists, that depriving children of education creates crime and that allowing everyone the same rights does not somehow dilute or diminish those rights. In other words, have to talk to the other side. Unfortunately, we first have to figure out how to use words they can hear.